


it was summer when i saw your face

by skatefasteatgrass



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan, The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mortal, M/M, everybody is alive FUCK canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-07-28 15:10:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20066077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skatefasteatgrass/pseuds/skatefasteatgrass
Summary: Now that Will Solace has finally finished high school, he’s determined to wipe it all from his memory, and start again. He doesn’t need, or want, to think about all the cliques he was never a part of, or the fights that started over false rumours, or the hours he spent zoned out with the tip of his pencil sitting on math equations. He just needs to zoom through the summer and skip all the bullshit, so he can make it to college in one piece, and then everything will unfold the way he wanted it to in the beginning.He had such high hopes, and such a foolproof plan, just to make it through the break completely unbothered. But Will wasn’t counting on a boy with flushed cheeks and really glittery shoes to grab his arm two days after the term ends, at a party he wasn’t invited to, and he wasn’t counting on the boy to quirk up his mouth and tell him he liked his freckles.And he definitely wasn’t prepared to fall in love with him.





	1. do you know his name?

On the first day of Summer, Will Solace wakes up at noon, and he wakes up grinning.

“This,” he announces as he throws open his door, hair still rumpled and skin still creased with sheet marks, “is where my _new _life begins.”  
His dog stares at him, then barks loudly and bounds towards him, as if Will’s excitement is the most contagious disease. A laugh echoes from the living room, and Naomi Solace pokes her head out of the doorway with a smile, her eyes crinkling.  
“That’s a pretty big statement to make, darling,” she says, and pats her knees, making a noise wither tongue that sounds like she could be trying to imitate a bird. “Hey, Noodle! Hop off him! Let him breathe.”

Will stumbles when Noodle jumps off his shins, his balance thrown off. He runs his hand through his curls and sighs loudly, stretching his arms up over his head in the most dramatic way he can muster and beaming at the roof. He can’t stop smiling—he hasn’t been able to keep the grin off his face since his last class of his last day.  
His _last day_. His last day of high school, _ever_. It’s why he can’t fight off this smile, why he’s so full of teenage energy and the desire to do something stupid and impulsive, why he spent three hours last night dancing along to _Bleachers _songs and spamming his Snapchat story with ‘HELL IS OVER!’ texts. He’s finally done with high school.

He can finally stop pretending to pay attention to ridiculously difficult equations and incredibly boring English ‘classics. Finally stop fake-smiling at Sherman Yang so that he doesn’t end up in the sick bay twice a week, finally stop calculating his walks to classes so he can avoid the group of girls that stare at him and giggle, finally stop counting the minutes until that shrill bell frees him from lectures and homework assignments. For the next eleven weeks, all he has to worry about is avoiding awkward encounters with old classmates he never liked and packing all his belongings into a couple of boxes, so he can move into his dorm at Yale.

“I feel like a god blessed me, or something,” Will says wistfully as he pours himself a mug of coffee, skipping the sugar and the milk. Despite his massive sweet tooth, he can’t stand any kind of coffee that isn’t black and bitter, which his half sister Kayla has called ‘proof he’s an extra-terrestrial’ more times than he count on his fingers. Naomi shakes her head and huffs a short breath from her nose, stealing a gulp from her son’s cup.  
“I never thought finishing high school was going to be such a big deal for you. Honestly, I thought you would cry more, the way you sobbed when you graduated middle school.”  
“Why would I waste my time crying? High school was hell.” Will rubs some sleep from his eyes and checks his recent notifications, unsurprised to see three missed calls from Lou-Ellen Blackstone and a text saying ‘happy start of Summer, Solace! you’d better wake up before one’ sent directly from Cecil Markowitz, who Will has dubbed infamous for his vaguely threatening wake-up messages.

Naomi shrugs.  
“I cried when I graduated high school. I cried for days.” She takes another sip of Will’s coffee, and he pouts at her, stealing it right back as she makes a face. “Maybe that was the hormones. You made me more of a cry-baby than anything else.”  
“It’s because your subconscious knew you were gonna raise a legend even when I was in the womb,” Will replies. He’s always loved this part of the day—where everything is quiet, and he just gets to joke around with his mom, no worries on his shoulders and no weights on his back. “It was just too much pressure for you.”  
“Maybe. Maybe it’s because you were my first kid, and my subconscious knew I’d be proud of you no matter what.”

There’s never been a day when Will wishes he was born to some other family. His may not be rich and lucky, or live in those big, three-storey houses, but they’re full of commitment. They’re passionate and they’re open, and Will never has to hesitate before he says, ‘I love you’, not even to his stepdad. He’d rather have compassionate parents and siblings than a cold family that buys trust any day.

“Where’s Craig?” Will asks, draining his coffee and yawning. He should probably get dressed, and answer Lou Ellen’s fourth call, but it’s not urgent. It can wait another five minutes. “And Finn? And Sophie?”  
“Craig’s at work until nine, and Sophie’s at her friend’s place. I have to pick her up at five. Finn’s still sleeping—or, I think he is. He could just be laying there again, on his phone. Can you go wake him up, darling? Tell him Craig wanted him up before twelve-thirty.”  
Will groans and hyperbolises his effort to slump around the kitchen and over to Finn’s room. He doesn’t mind waking his stepbrother up, not _really_—he just likes to be dramatic. Naomi knows that—she snorts at his exaggeration.

Will doesn’t bother knocking on Finn’s door, because he knows he’ll just pretend to be asleep. He throws it open and leans against the doorway with a shit-eating grin, arms folded as he watches Finn’s head whip in his direction, a scowl creeping up on his face.  
“What?” He snaps. His dark hair is plastered to his forehead, and he pulls some stray strands out of his mouth, squinting as Will wanders in and flicks open the shutters.  
“Craig wants you up before twelve-thirty. And it’s twelve-twenty-seven.”  
Finn moans, and falls back, smothering his own face with his pillow. He looks completely different to Will—dark hair, green eyes, freckle-free tan skin and bony knees. It’s no wonder everyone jumps straight to the ‘so he’s your _stepbrother_, right?’ question, skipping over the whole “are you guys really brothers?’ thing.

“C’mon, get up!” Will smacks Finn with another pillow and yanks the other one off his face. Finn looks murderous.  
“Piss _off_, Will!” He says with a grumpy tone, and Will rolls his eyes. Oh, the joys of a fourteen-year-old brother. It would be better if he didn’t have to deal with the exact same thing when he was at his dad’s, and Austin was moping about some girl who he had a crush on but was dating another boy. Will doesn’t get it, seriously—he wasn’t so obsessed with dating someone when _he _was fourteen.  
“Don’t let mom here you swear,” he warns, as Finn finally swings his legs out of bed and cracks his ankles. “She might kill you.”  
“She’s too sweet,” Finn snarks back.  
“You never know, darling, I could be capable of murder,” Naomi yells from the kitchen. Will reels in the satisfaction Finn’s wide eyes and red cheeks bring, snickering as he ducks from Finn’s smack of a pillow and runs to his own room.

Will throws clothes on quickly, changing into his usual attire that Drew Tanaka usually cringes at—blue, short-sleeved plaid over a bright orange t-shirt, khakis and sandals. He doesn’t even particularly like the look, but the way Drew gasps in horror and yells ‘Solace, you’re going to give me _nightmares!’_ is kind of worth it. Besides, it’s comfortable, and he can wear what he wants; it’s summer, high school is over forever, and doesn’t have to dress for anybody.  
He brushes his teeth carefully, like he does every morning and night, the result of getting too many cavities as a kid and now being paranoid he’ll have to go get more teeth pulled. He chucks some coconut-smelling product in his curls and changes his plain black earrings to silver studs.

Summer is here for _sure_. These earrings haven’t come out since last year.

Will finally picks up his phone on Lou Ellen’s fifth call, buckling his sandals and grabbing a piece of toast from Naomi with a grateful smile.  
“Finally!” Lou Ellen yells when he finally answers. “Jesus, one would think you’d gotten your dumb ass killed. Didn’t Cecil say to wake up before one?”  
“I did!” Will insists through a mouthful of peanut-butter and crumbs. “You know my rule, I don’t answer texts or calls before I’m ready for the day. Otherwise I just get counterproductive.”  
“It’s Summer, for Christ’s sake, you can _do _that now. You’re _allowed _to do jack shit all day.”  
“Not when I’m friends with you!”

The line goes silent, and Will waits patiently while he taps his fingers on his leg. Finally, Lou Ellen sighs, and Will holds back his laugh.  
“Yeah, whatever.” Lou Ellen’s voice crackles through the receiver, and Will hears a door open faintly in the background, then heavy footsteps. “Look, I hope you’re dressed, because I’m on my way to yours to pick you up. I wanted to chill at Cecil’s pool all day, but Drew _insists _that she has to go shopping first and buy you Summer clothes that don’t make her physically sick. To quote her.”  
“It’s the first day of Summer, and we’re going _shopping_?”  
“Yeah, but Drew promised she’d buy us all smoothies if we went, and I’m up for a free drink, even if it’s a banana smoothie. Also, I want to watch Cecil make a fool of himself trying to find his first summer love.”

Since they were fourteen, Cecil has insisted on trying to put himself into a corny teen romance novel set in the summer, and he hasn’t succeeded once. The closest he’s come was the boy Will thinks was named James, who accepted his number but never called him. Will feels a little sorry for him.

“Maybe he should just wait until college,” Will says, tugging his backpack over his shoulder and planting himself in the chair by the door. He watches Finn, who’s in the kitchen pouring himself a bowl of cornflakes with his eyes closed and his head in his hand, which seems unreasonable. “He just needs to be patient.”  
“Right? But, whatever. Anyway, I hope you’re not wearing those sandals or the khakis, because Drew might force you to change into the clothes she buys you and then throw all your old shit out.”  
Will pulls at his shorts and stares at his sandals, grimacing.  
“I’m sure it’ll be fine.”  
“_Will_.”  
“She’s not gonna throw them out!”  
“Have you _met _Drew?”

Lou Ellen hangs up before Will can get another word in, and thirty seconds later, his door swings open. She stands before him in all her glory, her short hair a fresh and bright shock of purple. She pulls at her cheeks when she sees Will’s outfit.  
“Every time, Will. You never learn.”  
“Hey, if she’s gonna buy me new clothes, I’m just going to be happy to take it. Free stuff, dude.”  
Lou Ellen snorts, her lips pulling into a humoured smile. She’s wearing her general sort of clothes—loose-fitting shorts that are frayed at the ankles, a white band t-shirt promoting _The Neighbourhood_ and the gold combat boots Will, Cecil and Drew had pooled in to buy her two years ago (Drew had picked them out. Will hadn’t even been allowed a say).

“Mom, I’m going out!” Will yells over his shoulder. Naomi looks up from where she had been scribbling dates into the family calendar, and frowns, her hair falling out of its messy ponytail at the back of her head.  
“Where?” She yells back. Everybody usually yells in this house, but not because they’re angry—simply because they’re mostly loud people.  
“The mall first. The Cecil’s. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”  
“Alright, okay. Hi, Lou Ellen! Bye, darling, be home by ten.”  
Will promises to abide the curfew, then he and Lou Ellen are running to the bus stop, and Will really wishes he’d at least changed his shoes from sandals to sneakers.

\--

“I feel like I just spent two hours being bullied and then the bully tried to buy my friendship back.”

Drew rolls her eyes and takes another sip of smoothie. At Will’s feet there are three bags full to the bursting of button-up shirts and trendy shorts, and a couple of pairs of nice boots and sneakers, plus a few books he’d spotted and bought impulsively.  
“Your mom is right, you’re the most melodramatic person in the world.” Drew runs her fingers over her milkmaid braids, as if checking for flaws and bumps, but they’re perfect. As usual. Will doesn’t know how she manages to do such flawless hairstyles every day; there wasn’t a single day of school where she had a bad hair day. Cecil once asked if she’d sold her soul to get the superpower.

“Thank you anyway,” Will says, chewing on his paper straw. Somewhere across the food court, he spots Cecil and Lou Ellen arguing over whether or not the boy with red hair and glasses will give Cecil his number. “You’re a good friend.”  
“Because I got sick of seeing you in the exact same, horrible outfit every day of summer?” Drew snorts. Then her face softens, and she stares at Will through her red-tinted sunglasses. “And who knows? Maybe it’ll make you look so handsome, you’ll be the one to find a summer romance.”  
“I think that’s illegal for me, to get a significant other before Cecil. He’s been trying so hard for five years, and I’m not even looking.”

Drew shrugs and finishes her smoothie, then stands up, shoulders her purse, and picks up her shopping bags.  
“Right. Get your stuff, let’s go get Cecil and Lou Ellen, and get the fuck out of here.”  
“Isn’t this place your ‘paradise’ or something?”  
“It is until _they _show up in one big group.”  
Drew’s pointing discreetly at a large, loud group of teenagers that have just walked into the food court. Will recognises a few of them—Percy Jackson, who’s name and photo is displayed in the trophy case at the high school Will just escaped for his swimming competitions, Frank Zhang, who does archery with Kayla on Monday evenings, and Piper Mclean, Drew’s half-sister, and probably the reason Drew wants to leave so suddenly.

Will looks away, because even though he’s really only heard nice things about these people, they’ve all been the most popular kids of their respective grades, and that’s intimidating. Also, Percy Jackson is _really _loud, and he’s attracting stares, and Will’s not about to be the sheep that follows the crowd.  
“God, _no_.” Drew hides her face behind her bags and runs to grab Cecil’s arm, tugging him with her. Lou Ellen follows, slurping her smoothie loudly, annoyingly, and probably on purpose. “Piper’s seen us. She’s gonna say hi. We gotta go.”  
“Drew!”  
“Motherfucker,” Drew hisses. Will has to laugh.

Piper appears suddenly, lifting her sunglasses to sit on top of her hair, just like Drew is doing. Aside from this small connection, the sisters look pretty much nothing alike, and their personalities go down the same path. While Drew’s hair is black and mostly kept in her famous milkmaid braids, Piper’s is short, choppy and brown, some strands braided and tied off with colourful elastics. Drew’s Japanese complexion and perfectly smooth skin is completely different to Piper’s brown, freckles and acne-riddled face, and while Drew dresses mostly in red dresses, plaid black skirts and tight red cropped shirts, Piper has worn the same denim shorts and maroon flannel every day of the year.

It’s weird to think they share a mother.

“Hey, Piper,” Will says with a cheerful wave, because Drew has her lips sealed and is glaring at Piper with folded arms, her bangles bunches together at her wrists. Piper beams in Will’s direction, throwing up her signature peace sign. Her wrist is adorned with a single beaded bracelet, which Drew says she’s had since she was ten.  
“What’s up, Solace? How’s it feel to be out of high school?”  
“Fantastic. I feel like I could do anything.”  
“Yeah, it’s like that.” Piper brushes her fringe off her face and blows harshly out of her nose. “God, I can’t believe it’s already been two years since I graduated. That’s nuts.”

“You don’t have to make everything about yourself, Pipes,” Drew snaps, finally opening her mouth. Piper rolls her eyes.  
“That’s rich, coming from you,” she replies. One of her friends, who has thick, curly blonde hair and is carrying a bag printed with the name of a bookshop, yells out Piper’s name, and Piper sighs.  
“A short-lived reunion, Solace, but a good one all the same. Take care of yourself. I’ll see you at Yale when you get there? Or sooner. Probably sooner.”  
“Piper!”  
“I’M COMING, ANNABETH!” Piper waves again, then rolls away on what Will can only assume is a pair of Heelys, which seems like a very Piper-esque thing to do.

As Will watches her go, his eyes fall on a boy who looks younger than the rest of the group, with black hair tied back in a short ponytail, some inky threads falling onto his cheeks, which are dusted with a few freckles here and there. One of his ears is studded with a fake amber crystal. He wears black jeans and a t-shirt with a glittering skull on it, and a pair of black, glittery Chuck Taylors that Will wishes he owned. He’s shaking his head at something an older boy with glasses is telling him, and for a moment, he catches Will’s gaze. He cocks an eyebrow, and gives a small flick of his hand, like a half-wave. Will manages a small wave back. The boy smiles, just a little, and in that way that definitely says: ‘who _is _he, and why’s he staring, and why’s he wearing socks with sandals?’, then turns back to the boy with glasses and starts talking back to him.

“She makes me want to strangle myself sometimes,” Drew exclaims, clutching at her cheeks. Cecil makes a sound like a hurt puppy.  
“I wish she came later. I was gonna shoot my shot.”  
“Piper saved your ass, Ceece,” Lou Ellen says, tossing her cup in the nearby trash can. It bounces off the rim and lands in the bag. “He looked like the kind of guy who would try and start a conversation with you at a party by telling you every reason Hitler wasn’t so bad.”  
Will isn’t really listening to their bickering. He’s still thinking about the boy with the sparkly shoes, thinking about the way he looked at Will like he thought he was strange, but the kind of strange you want to understand and get to know.

“What are you thinking about?” Drew asks. Nothing goes by her unnoticed. Will shakes his hair out of his eyes, and casts one more look over his shoulder. The boy is standing with his back to them, in line at McDonalds with Percy Jackson.  
“Nothing. Not really.” Will turns back, and tightens his grip on the bags full of clothes Drew bought him. She had said they might attract attention. Why did he want to suddenly throw them all on? “Uh, that boy, with the skull t-shirt? Do you know his name?”  
Drew squints back to where the boy is standing.  
“Next to Percy?”  
“Yeah.”

Drew shrugs.  
“I don’t know, he doesn’t really hang out with Piper too much. I think he goes out with them because he and Percy have known each other for a while, and Percy drags him out. Maybe it’s Nick? I don’t really remember.”  
Nick. Will rolls the name over and over in his head, pulling it apart letter by letter.   
He doesn’t reach his conclusion until he’s sitting with his legs dangling in Cecil’s pool, watching Lou Ellen do a backflip.  
The boy doesn’t look like he’d suit the name Nick.


	2. nothing, really

“You’re stuck in your head again.”

Will feels a sharp jab in his skull and turns to see Lou Ellen’s finger still raised. She arches her brows.  
“Sorry.” Will readjusts his grip on the shopping bags he’s been lugging around all day. The street lamp they pass under makes Lou Ellen’s skin look silver. “Zoned out.”  
“What were you dwelling on?” Lou Ellen uses Will’s arm to help herself up onto the railing that runs along the path, and balances on it as she walks. Looking at Lou Ellen and her personality, you’d never think that she’d done gymnastics or cheerleading, but it was the truth. Will had gone to dozens of her competitions with Cecil and Drew. She had given it up long ago, but it’s evident in the way that she jumps from bar to bar that it’s part of her past.

“Nothing, really,” Will lies, fiddling with his pendant, a gift from his father when he had turned sixteen. “Just… dad.”  
It’s a wonder Lou Ellen doesn’t see through his bullshit. Will’s never thinking about Lester—it isn’t worth it. He never sees him, even when he’s at his place for a rare weekend, because he’s always ‘too busy’, whether it be with the music lessons he teaches, his lectures at the local med school, or simply just not caring. It’s weird—he’ll do anything for Kayla, or Austin, but when it comes to Will, there’s nothing. An empty space.

Maybe it’s because Will’s the product of the only one-night stand Lester ever had. Or maybe not. Will doesn’t think about it.

Lou Ellen jumps off the railing and swerves in front of Will to step into her driveway. Will stops, and fist-bumps her.  
“Don’t think about him too much, Will. He’s an asshole, and you deserve a better father. Naomi deserves a better ex.”  
“She has Craig, now.”  
“And thank god for that.” Lou Ellen waves as she walks backwards to the small, cottage-looking home she shares with her mom and half-brother. “Okay, Will, I’ll see you soon. I love you, ‘kay?”  
“Love you too.”  
Lou Ellen turns on her heel and climbs up the driveway. Will stays where he is for a bit, just observing—Lou Ellen appears in the kitchen window with a glass of water, and her brother jumps onto the kitchen counter.

Will shakes his head and continues along the path. He’s not some creep who watches his friends and their family through the window.  
It’s a short walk to his place—he and Lou Ellen have grown up thirty seconds away from each other ever since she moved here when they were five. It’s convenient. And comforting.  
“I’m home,” Will announces as he enters the hallway. He hears quick, light and rushed footsteps race toward him, and Sophie, his half-sister, skids around the corner. Her dark pigtails curly down to her shoulders, clipped with butterfly clips Will bought her for Christmas last year.  
“Will!” she yells, and jumps up onto Will’s torso. Will catches her and almost falls backwards, jamming his foot into the corner of the wall just in time to steady himself. He’s never been super strong.

“Hey, Sophie,” Will gasps, and hoists her up so he can carry her back to her room. “Holy moly, why are you still awake? It’s way past your bedtime.”  
“Not for the summer!”  
“Sophie!” Craig whisper-shouts. He steps out of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand, and sighs when he sees Sophie awake. “You were supposed to be in bed an hour ago. We tucked you in and everything.”  
“I wanted to say hi to Will!” Sophie’s almost a carbon copy of Finn and Craig, spare for her freckles—they match Will’s to the extent that she’s covered in them. Craig shakes his head, and catches Will’s eye.  
“Hey, son. How was the first day of summer?”

Will likes Craig. He seriously likes him a lot better than he likes his own dad, which is saying something. When Naomi had announced she was getting married to him, when Will was eleven and Finn was seven, and Sophie wasn’t even an idea, Will had asked if he could replace Lester as his real dad—Naomi had told him that Craig was just going to be his stepdad, but to Will, he was sort of the real thing. What good was a deadbeat dad when your stepdad actually remembered your favourite books and movies and prompted you to talk about them, or stayed home when you were sick and your mom couldn’t get off work?  
Now that Will thinks about it, it’s kind of sad that he praises Craig for even the bare minimum (even though he goes above and beyond anyway), if it means Lester can’t even reach that.

Even if Craig does act like a typical suburban white dad who listens to Imagine Dragons in an effort to seem cool, he’s one of Will’s favourite people.

“Yeah, it was cool. Drew bought me a bunch of new clothes because she said she was going to stop functioning if she had to see me wear sandals and khakis every day of summer.”  
“I didn’t think your clothes were that bad,” Craig insists, and Will does a double take—he’s only now realising Craig is wearing a very similar outfit.  
So Drew’s right, then. Will dresses like a dad.  
“You make it a better trend than I ever could, Craig,” Will says. Craig smiles and laughs a little, looking off to the side like he’s proud of himself for being a trendsetter, or because he’s getting complimented by his stepson and not everybody can brag about that.

“Thanks, son.” Craig turns his attention back to Sophie, whose head is dropping slowly onto Will’s shoulder. Subsequently, Will’s shoulders are also slowly dropping, and losing feeling—Sophie may only be five years old, but she’s pretty heavy, and Will _seriously _isn’t that strong. “Right, Sophie, back to you—you need to go to bed. Again.”  
Sophie pouts, and showcases her best puppy dog-eyes, making her lip wobble a bit to throw in some extra pizazz. Will has _no _idea where she learnt how to do that, because he never tried that on his mom as a kid (Naomi was strangely immune to those kinds of things when he was little), and Finn had never been good at it when he was younger. Regardless of where she learnt it, she’s very persuasive with it.

“No, it’s ten o’clock. Time for you to go to bed.” Craig avoids Sophie’s stare with expertise, closing his eyes and shaking his head.  
“I don’t wanna,” Sophie whines, and draws out her sentence so it sounds even more annoying and childish. “I wanna stay up with Will and Finn!”  
“We’re going to bed too, Soph,” Will says with sincerity, even though he’s lying through his teeth. There’s no other way to get Sophie to go to bed at a decent time for a five-year-old. “So that means you _have _to.”  
Sophie pauses, and mills over what he’s saying. Will can see the cogs in her tiny brain spinning and creaking as she tries to decipher if he’s telling the truth or not.  
“_Fine_,” she finally says, and Will feels the relief flood through his body like a tidal wave. “But Will has to tuck me in.”

Once Sophie’s asleep (for real this time), Will jumps in the shower, brushes his teeth, and collapses into his beanbag in the corner of his room. The clothing Drew bought for him is hanging in his wardrobe, next to all the shirts he’ll be keeping for chill days at home when he just hangs around blasting his music and enjoying his lack of homework. Will flicks his ceiling lights off and turns on his string lights that hang across his ceiling in a sweeping pattern, illuminating the room with a dull, soft glow, and hits play on his ‘soundtrack of my life if it was a movie’ playlist. He settles back into the beanbag and smiles softly.

This. This is the part of Summer he’s been looking forward to since Christmas—just calming down and relaxing after spending a day with his friends, enjoying not having to wake up early the next day for classes he won’t even enjoy. Will scrolls through his playlist, just to see if it needs any updating.  
He started the playlist when his senior year had started and realised that if he was the main character in a teen movie, this would be the opening, and every movie needed a soundtrack. So, he filled it with songs he felt either described him, or a significant part of his life, or just songs that meant a lot to him. There’s a lot of Bleachers on there, as well as The 1975.

Will’s phone buzzes with a notification from Instagram, and he opens it, expecting a text from Cecil that says he forgot something at his place, but it’s just another post from Piper Mclean, ten pictures in one post of her wearing her comically big sunglasses and standing with her arms around all different friends. Will rolls his eyes (a habit he’s started to copy off Drew), because he had seriously been expecting some weird, late-night text from Cecil, but he flicks through the pictures anyway. The first one is Piper with the blonde girl who’d called her over in the mall today—she’s kissing her cheek while she holds a bottle of water in one hand, and Piper’s eyes are crinkled as she grins mid-laugh. In the second slide, Piper’s leg is thrown up and a blond boy with glasses catches it, while a boy who can’t be any taller than five foot three jumps, so his face is between them, his tongue stuck out.

The next one is Piper and Percy Jackson. Then Piper and Frank Zhang. Piper and a girl with dark skin and her tight curls tucked in space buns. Piper, Percy, the blonde girl and the boy with glasses dancing. They’re all pictures of Piper enjoying her Summer beside a pool with her multitude of friends, and Will’s stomach feels tight, because it’s kind of ironic that an hour ago he was doing the same thing she is now, just with a smaller group. And it’s a little ironic that Will and Piper were close once, when they were eight years old and their parents knew each other through work. Before Will started hanging out with Drew instead, and Piper got busy spending all her time at these friends she had that all had their names thrown around at school just because they made themselves known.

Will shakes himself out of his head and swipes off the ninth photo (a candid of Piper, sitting on the blonde girl’s lap and talking about something with her eyes half-closed. Will’s starting to think she and this blonde are a little more than friends. He’ll have to ask Drew), and the tenth loads onto his screen. He almost scrolls past it but does a double take when he recognises the shirt.  
It’s the boy with the glittering skull on his chest, the glitzy black Converse and the black hair tied into a scrabbly ponytail at the back of his neck. He’s smiling with his lips closed, but he looks like he’d rather be somewhere else. Piper’s arm rests on his head, and he looks away from the camera, eyes narrowed in that ‘I want to go home’ way.

Will eyes the caption of the post, as if that’ll somehow miraculously reveal the name of the boy (who doesn’t seem to be tagged anywhere).

_pipesmcqueen: day one, first ‘party’ of the Summer! But day two’s the real deal, Jason   
jacegrace commented: blast my party to everybody then, I don’t care :(_

A familiar feeling settles in Will’s gut (that impulsive need that summer brings) as he clicks _jacegrace_’s username, and realises he’s the one wearing glasses, evident from the latest post of him smiling weirdly like he wasn’t prepared for a photo. There’s a couple of posts of Percy, all candid shots, and a fair few of Piper and the shorter boy, but the one that sticks out the most to Will makes his hands sweaty.  
The boy with the glittering shoes. He looks different in the photo—maybe because it was taken two months ago. He wears a school uniform as he pulls a face at the camera, cheek smushed onto Jason’s shoulder and mixed with a bright smile. He certainly looks happier in this photo than the one at Piper’s, and Will casts his gaze to the caption.

_jacegrace: nico snuck out to visit me again lmaoooooooo_  
pipesmcqueen commented: he’s there to eat those fuckin brownies u always make bc they taste good  
jacegrace replied: @pipesmcqueen maybe so but I hope they were worth it bc he’s got detention now  
percyjackass replied: @jacegrace I mean it’s his last year and he has like two months left I doubt he gives a shit lol

_Nico._ Not Nick.  
Will feels his heart beat faster and faster, and his face flush. He’s not sure why this boy makes him feel like somebody’s stuck him in a sauna and force-fed him straight caffeine, but he definitely wants to know him more. He wants to see his faint freckles up close. He wants to be the one who’s shoulder Nico uses as a pillow, or something like that. Will finds himself scrolling more and more through Jason’s profile, absorbing what he can, even though the times Nico pops up are rare and sparse. His sister is the girl with space buns, from what Will can gather. And he doesn’t often let his hair out of that tiny ponytail. And he’s always, _always _wearing those same sparkling shoes.

_Nico_. Will wants to know more of him. He swipes to his messages with Drew, and types as fast as he can, ignoring the spelling mistakes and the shortcuts, since Drew will understand anyway,  
_wi11so1ace: r u invited 2 th party tomrrw night?  
drewtanaknah: ugh yeah but I’m not going because Piper said no plus ones >:(  
_Will takes a deep breath.  
_wi11so1ace: fr th sake of ur best friend, can you break that rule?_  
drewtanaknah: obvs I love u and would do anything for u. but like. why.  
wi11so1ace: I just wanna try these new clothes out.

Drew doesn’t reply, but she likes the message, and Will’s known her long enough to get that that’s a definite yes, and also that she knows something else is going on. Will’s face splits into a wide grin as he plugs his headphones in so he can turn the volume up, and taps his foot melodically along to Rex Orange County, continuing his scrolling through Instagram even though he’s distracted. Every ‘aesthetic’ photo posted by Finn (which are all just photos he’s taken around the house with a black-and-white filter and an angsty caption) remind him of Nico’s general attire. The three-lined haikus Kayla uploads make him think of how many words Will could use to describe Nico’s small smiles and the way he had waved at him in the mall.

_It’s stupid_, Will tells himself, but he can’t stop smiling. Even if he promised himself he was just going to make it through the Summer with his friends and a scholarship to Yale, and no Summer flings (that’s Cecil’s thing anyway), even if he’s never felt the need to get into a relationship before, _even _if Will never wanted those button-ups but now feels like maybe Drew was right, and he could attract some attention, he’s finding it pathetically difficult to get Nico off his mind_. Which is ridiculous_, Will repeats again and again while he half-covers his smile with his knuckles and double-taps one of his old classmate’s photo of their college acceptance letter. _Because I’ve never had a proper crush before, and I shouldn’t start getting them now_. The song changes, but Will’s smile stays stuck on his face and his heart stays thumping.

It’s too late. Will’s tapping his foot along to Cavetown, he’s sitting in dim golden light, the cicadas outside are screaming, he can’t keep a smile off his face, and high school is over.  
It’s summer. And Will has a (_really, honestly stupid) _crush on a boy he’s never even spoken to.


	3. i like your freckles

Will paces his room, back and forth, tugging at the collar of his button-up and glancing in the mirror every five seconds to make sure his hair hasn’t sprung out of its gel prison yet, like it will inevitably do at some point tonight. It’s still curly, but instead of just letting it go wherever the wind blows it, Will’s forced it to swoop to the side. His shirt is sky blue (Drew had said it would make his eyes pop, or something like that, when they’d bought it), and he’s wearing the ripped denim jeans Drew let him pick out. Even his shoes are out of the ordinary—no sandals and socks, or just flip-flops this time. He’s gone the extra mile and actually bothered to chuck on a pair of lace-up Vans he’s owned for years but never bothered to wear. They’re printed with sunflowers—a gift from his older brother on his dad’s side. Before he went to college, and they lost time to talk.

Will still feels sweaty and flushed around his neck, so he undoes one of his buttons, but now he looks like he’s trying to show off (even though he doesn’t really have any defining features to do so with), so he does it back up and tries to ignore how itchy his collarbone is getting. He checks his watch again, fanning his cheeks in the desperate hope that they’ll turn back to their usual tawny colour before Drew gets here, which the watch says is ten minutes away.  
Will’s stomach does a flip when he thinks about what he’s about to do. Piper had told Drew she couldn’t bring any plus-ones, and yet here he is, about to jump in Drew’s car and crash said party. Hell, it isn’t even Piper’s party—it’s some kid named Jason’s, and Will’s only going so he can try and talk to a boy he’s seen once.

When he and Piper were close, she used to tell him about all the parties she was going to throw when she was a teenager, and that he’d be invited to all of them. Every single one, no matter what.  
Then they grew up. Piper found new friends, ones who made themselves known without even trying (with the exception of Nico, so it seems), and ones that didn’t cry when even the smallest of things went wrong. And Will found friends who weren’t really into parties all that much. Will has always been fine with that; parties usually make his chest feel tight and his fingers twitchy, so he’d much rather just sit around a pool with three other people all summer. He wonders if Piper feels the same way about their growing apart.

The doorbell rings and echoes through the empty house. Naomi, Craig and Sophie are out for dinner celebrating Craig’s cousin’s birthday, and Finn’s staying the night at his friend’s. Will makes sure he grabs his keys before he leaves the house, and turns off all the lights. Even though the house is small, it looks big and cold when nobody’s in there to make it feel like a home.  
“Hey,” Will greets Drew as he shuts the door behind him and is glad to feel a slight breeze on his face. Drew takes a step back and whistles as best she can, looking Will up and down and nodding with her signature smirk.  
“Woah, Solace. Somebody did a good job picking out your clothes.”  
“Yeah, she’s this girl, she’s pretty good at accessorising.”

Drew snickers, and they slide into her car. She starts up the engine and checks her reflection in the mirror, though Will really doesn’t see the point—her lipstick is never smudged, her hair never out of place, her clothes never wrinkled. She’s wearing a white t-shirt under a strappy red dress, her hair out of its usual braids and pinned back from her face with clips. Flawless. Will didn’t really expect anything else.  
Once upon a time, Will had a tiny crush on Drew. He was fifteen, and full of hormones, and that had been the year Drew had stopped being so insecure and started wearing whatever she wanted instead of what she thought made her ‘fit in’. She suited confidence; she still does.

“Right.” Drew folds the mirror away and pulls off the curb. “Are you gonna tell me why you all of a sudden want to go to a party at _Jason Grace’s _house? Because I’m pretty sure you didn’t even know who Jason was the last time we saw each other.”  
“I, um…” Will sinks into his seat and watches a car zoom past them. “Remember that guy? I asked if you knew his name, and you said you thought it was Nick? I saw him in Piper’s post last night, and then Piper’s caption was about tonight’s party… and I dunno, I went digging in Jason’s profile and saw he’s pretty close with Nico, so I thought he might be there. Tonight. Maybe.”  
“Uh-huh. Who’s Nico?”  
“The guy? His name is Nico, not Nick.”  
“_Oh_! Yeah, well, I was close.”

Drew makes a right turn, and Will realises they’re heading toward the richer part of town, where Drew’s family lives. He immediately feels less comfortable than he already was—rich people tend to make him uncomfortable. They’re usually more interested in counting coins than smiling at people they love. Most of the time.  
“I didn’t know Jason lived out here,” Will says nervously. Drew scoffs.  
“You don’t know _anything _about him, other than the fact that he’s friends with some guy you have a crush on.”  
“I don’t have a crush on him!” Will snaps, feeling his face flush again. “I just. I wanna get to know him better.”  
“Sure.”

Drew’s still smirking. She’s always been good when it comes to romance, and dating, and whatever. When they were in school, she was the number one go-to if you had relationship issues, or an unrequited crush. She’ll probably continue to be the number one go-to when they get to college. Will used to be jealous of the way people ran to her, or the way she could catch anybody’s attention as soon as she wandered into a room, until he realised he’d rather be the quiet helper. The one people were surprised by.  
That’s why he’s going to be a nurse. People won’t really remember his name, but they’ll remember what he did for them. That’s the kind of helper he wants to be.

Drew turns into a long driveway that leads to a three-storey house built of white brick and full of big windows, and from what Will can hear, dozens of people. Music, dulled just a little by the walls of the house, throbs through the air as Will opens the door and runs a hand over his curls, just to check they’re still in place. They seem fine for now, but he doesn’t really trust them to stay that way for too much longer.  
“Look, I’m not gonna lie to you, Piper’s probably going to open the door.” Drew pulls her dress down a little, and stands next to Will, three inches taller than him. Drew and Will are usually the same height—they’ve always been pretty tall for their age—but tonight, she’s wearing heels. Will feels just a little bit intimidated.

“Okay,” Will says, trying to sound casual. His voice cracks.  
“She won’t be mad. I mean, what’s the time?” Drew grabs Will’s watch and peers at the hands. “Eight o’clock. She’s probably tipsy by now. She’ll just open the door, be like ‘hey omg you came!’, and then push a drink in your hand. And then she’ll go back to taking shots with Leo or something.”  
“Does she do that often?” Will asks as Drew rings the doorbell and he taps his foot anxiously. The music sounds generic and kind of shitty, but what was Will expecting? It’s a party, where people dance and jump around and do impulsive things just because they can. They’re not going to be playing acoustic covers.

The door flings open, and Piper slides into view, a bottle of Smirnoff in her hand. She laughs.  
“Drew! You came!” She turns to Will. “And you brought Will! Fuck yeah!”  
“Hey, Piper.” Will feels himself uncoil and relax just a little, because Piper clearly doesn’t mind him being at a party she didn’t invite him to. Piper ushers them inside, and Will’s immediately overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people here, dancing or talking or making out in corners. He can see Percy Jackson at the back of the room, wearing a snapback backwards and drinking from a red cup while he talks to Jason.  
“Hey, in all honesty? I was kind of worried you weren’t being social.” Piper’s still talking to Will. He arches his brow. “I barely ever see you out and about.”

“I’m social with a few people,” Will insists defensively. Piper shushes him and shoves a cup in his direction. Drew scowls.  
“Where’s mine?” She asks. Piper rolls her eyes, and tips what looks like an ungodly amount of vodka from the Smirnoff bottle into another cup, topping it off with orange juice and handing it to her.  
“Go drink those and have a good fucking time, yeah? I can’t believe you guys are finished high school. Enjoy the party!”  
“Where are you going?” Will asks. Piper grins, and points outside, where a heap of people mill in and around the pool.  
“To get drunk and not take the summer for granted. See ya!”

She disappears among the crowd of people. Will stares into his drink, a weird amber liquid he’s definitely never had before.  
“What _is _this?” He asks. Drew shrugs, taking a gulp of her own.  
“Beer? Maybe whiskey. Or rum and ginger ale. You never know with Piper.” Will takes a sip and crinkles his nose at the bitter taste. He keeps his drink at the side with his hand over the top of it.  
“Definitely beer,” he says. Drew makes a gagging motion, and tightens her hand on her own cup, probably glad Piper knows what she likes.  
Will shakes his head and bites his tongue, trying to get rid of the yeasty taste, as he scans the room. He can see loads of people he recognises from Piper’s post, and even a couple who went to his high school around the same time Piper did.

“Is that Travis Stoll?” Will points at a boy with sandy brown hair, who’s sitting on a table and chatting with a redheaded girl in a green dress. Drew nods.  
“Probably. Oh, holy shit! That’s Calypso!”  
“From the year above us?”  
“Yeah! I’m gonna go talk to her, she was in the cheer team with me.”  
“Wait, Drew, hold up—”  
It’s too late. Drew’s gone, weaving between people with expertise with a beeline for Calypso, who looks only a little different to what she did when Will knew her at school. Will stands stock-still, suddenly alone. This is the one thing he wishes Drew wouldn’t do: leave him alone and in a completely new environment because she didn’t think her actions through.

Will takes a step back, and almost runs into a boy with vivid green hair. He apologises with a red face, but the boy looks unbothered, and waves him off. Will takes a shaky breath.  
_You came here for a reason_, he reminds himself. _Find Nico. Shouldn’t be too hard_.  
Except it is. There are a lot of boys here with relatively long black hair, or black t-shirts with skulls on them, or small earrings. None of them are wearing glittery black Chuck Taylors.  
Will feels his stomach shrivel. This isn’t the atmosphere he likes or is even used to—he wishes he had have just forgotten about Nico after he saw him so he could just go home and spend the night playing Mario Kart with Finn and Sophie.

So he came here to find Nico, and he can’t even do that. Will swallows thickly. It’s not too late to leave; he’s only been here for five minutes, tops, and he could always just drive Drew’s car home. She could get it back tomorrow. It’s not like anybody here would miss him, or even realise he’s gone. Not even Piper would care if he just slipped out of the door and left this shitty, cheap beer in the entrance. Actually, he wouldn’t even have to go too far—he could just get out of the sweaty mass of dancing bodies, into fresh air, even if it means just sitting in the gutter and waiting until Drew’s ready to get back home, or until a drunk girl sees him and strikes up an incomprehensible conversation. It wouldn’t matter to anybody. He should just leave.

Will’s in the entry, setting his cup down on a buffet that looks to expensive to even be in his general vicinity, when he feels somebody tap his shoulder-blade.  
He spins around, and his heart flies to his throat, because _holy shit, it’s Nico_.

“You’re leaving early.” Nico stands with one hand gripping a can of Fanta, and the other hanging onto the belt loops of his black jeans by his thumb. His face is adorned with a small, cocky smile as he raises an eyebrow.  
“Oh, I…” Will clears his throat and scratches the back of his neck, feeling his ears burn. “I mean. Yeah.”  
“You only just got here,” Nico adds like he never heard him, and Will hasn’t heard his voice before, but it’s only slightly deep and it carries some sarcasm and humour. It’s really… _nice_. “Why would you want to go?”  
“I just kind of, uh… I realised that parties suck. They’re not my thing.”  
Nico’s smile grows as he gives a small huff of a laugh.

“Yeah? What tipped it for you? The loud music, the PDA, the amount of people throwing up…” Nico peers into Will’s cup and his lip quirks. “The shitty beer that Piper insists is better warm?”  
“Better warm? That’s gross,” Will says without thinking, and Nico chuckles again. _Fuck_. Will promised Drew he didn’t have a crush on him, but now that they’re talking, and he’s up close… he’s not quite sure why he made that promise. “I think all of it. Mostly the fact that my friend easily forgets that I turn into a deer in headlights when she decides to go catch up with somebody and leaves me alone.”  
“Friends can be overrated sometimes,” Nico says. He pushes some strands of black hair off his face and behind his ear. “All of mine have the same flaw.”  
“Yeah?”  
“Mhm. They all _enjoy _these things.”

Nico waves his hand around, gesturing to the entire house. Will laughs, and prays it doesn’t come off as nervous.  
“I, uh…” he looks down. The signature shoes are there, just where Will was expecting. “I like your shoes.”  
“You do?” Nico looks genuinely surprised, and turns out his foot to stare at them, like he’s seeing them in a new light. “I… thanks. I bought them a year ago, I think. They’re my favourite.”  
“They’re, um… they’re cool. I wish I had a pair.”  
Nico looks thoughtful and raises his eyes back to look at Will with the eyebrow arch that’s making Will’s hands sweaty and chest fluttery.  
“Well. I like your freckles.”

It’s a genuine compliment, and Will knows this, because nobody’s ever told him they like his freckles before. He has so many of them, everywhere—on his shoulders, his back, his face, his neck, his arms, his legs, even the tops of his feet and hands. He’s covered in the little brown dots, but people either overlook them, or avoid looking at them completely. For some reason, people seem to hate that Will looks different to them, or that he’s speckled with natural spots that aren’t contagious.  
“Thank you,” Will breathes. Nico shrugs, and folds his arms, his water sploshing in the bottle.  
“You’re welcome, uh…” he balks, and does a double-take, like he can’t believe he’s forgotten something important. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

Will had forgotten that they’d never talked. That he isn’t really supposed to know Nico’s name, because it would be weird. He bites his lip.  
“Will,” he answers. “Will Solace.”  
“I’m Nico,” Nico responds. “Nico di Angelo. And this party fucking sucks.”  
“It’s the worst. I honestly don’t want to be here.”  
“You don’t have to.” For a second, Will feels his entire being crumble. He doesn’t want this conversation to end right now, or ever, honestly. Is Nico bringing it to a stop?  
But he continues.  
“I mean, Jason called upstairs as off-limits, but he’d let me up there. I think once you’ve known somebody for fourteen years it would be weird to block them out of certain parts of the house.”

Will tugs at his collar. Jesus, it seriously is _really _hot here, and he can’t tell if it’s because it’s summer, or because there are dozens of sweaty individuals moving around, or because he’s _super _nervous right now.  
“It’d be pretty fucking weird, yeah.”  
“You wanna come with me?”  
Will glances back into the massive living room, where Drew’s found a boy they had chemistry class with last year, and then looks back at Nico. His eyebrow is still arched, his lip still quirked, his arms still folded. His grey hoodie is cropped at his navel and sticks to his chest. Will bites back a grin.  
“Yeah. Beats being down here.”


	4. i could make you one

Nico seems satisfied with Will’s answer—he smiles wider, then closes his hand softly around Will’s arm, and pulls him slowly through the thicket of people. As they go, Will catches Drew’s eye—she winks, and wiggles her eyebrows, before turning back to the boy Will thinks is named Paolo. As they pass the bar, Nico grabs an almost-full bottle of whiskey, the liquid inside sloshing as they push through and towards the staircase, which is roped off and blocked with a paper sign that says ‘please don’t :(‘ in neat, printed handwriting.  
“Jason thinks adding emoticons to his requests will make people pay attention,” Nico explains as he ducks under the rope, and tugs Will gently so he’ll do the same.

“Would have worked on me,” Will says, and he’s being totally truthful. He’s the kind of person who adds smileys with hats at the end of his texts in the afternoon, especially when he’s talking to Cecil. It balances out the ominous vibes of Cecil’s messages.  
“You must be super empathetic, then.”  
“I’d say I’m pretty empathetic.”  
The music fades a little as they ascend the staircase. Will’s wrist tingles where Nico’s fingers wrap around it. As they pace through the hallway, Nico stops in front of a closed door with a scowl, and presses his ear to it.  
“Fucking hell,” he snaps. He doesn’t let go of Will’s arm as he slams his fist against the door over and over. “Hey! Open up!”

It swings open with a bang as it hits the wall, and a girl with the greenest eyes Will’s ever seen in his life appears, her strawberry-blonde hair tousled and mussed. Her orange shirt slips off her shoulder.  
“What?” She looks dazed, and drunk. She leans heavily against the doorframe as she speaks, and her eyes wander down to where Nico’s hand grips Will’s arm. “Oh. Sorry, Nico, this one’s taken.”  
“No, I—that’s not—this isn’t _that_.” Nico’s hand slips off Will’s like he’s only just realising what he’s been doing. “You’re not supposed to be up here. Didn’t you see the sign?”  
“I did. Travis said it was fine, that Jason doesn’t mind.”  
“Well Travis is wrong. Sorry, Katie, but you guys’ll have to go back downstairs.”  


Will recognises her as Nico says her name. Katie Gardener, who was in Will’s year but at a different school. She had been infamous among students, not only as the troublemaker Travis Stoll’s girlfriend, but as the girl who raised a thousand dollars selling flowers that she grew herself on Valentines Day two years ago. Will had heard she donated it all to some noble cause, but now that he’s remembering it all, he can’t recall the name of the charity.  
“Okay,” Katie slurs, then stumbles out of the doorway. Travis Stoll appears behind her with a lipstick kiss on his cheek. Nico folds his arms.  
“Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to try and seduce drunk girls? Even if they’re your girlfriends?”  
“That’s not what was happening.” Travis rolls his eyes. “She’s, like, _really _drunk. I brought her up here so she could try and nap. She had other plans, I said no.”

Nico suddenly looks like he has a lot more respect for Travis. He shrugs, and jolts his thumb over his shoulder.  
“That’s caring of you, but rules are rules, especially here. You know what’ll happen if Jason’s dad finds out that people came up here. Shoo. Take her back home or something.”  
“Why do you get to stay up here, then?” Travis asks, catching Katie by the waist as she stumbles again and almost trips over her own feet. She pushes her hair out of her eyes.  
“Yeah, what up with _that_?” She reinforces.  
“Privileges. Once you’ve been Jason’s friend for fourteen years, let me know, and you can come up here whenever you like.”  
Travis nods, but rolls his eyes again, and leads Katie carefully towards the staircase. Nico sighs.

“Told you. Some people aren’t so caring about frowny faces.”  
He leaves the door open, and nudges Will gently further down the hallway. Will complies almost immediately and finds himself directly next to Nico as they walk, counting their footsteps. Considering how short Nico is, he’s managing to keep up with Will pretty damn well.  
They reach an open door at the end of the hallway, and Nico slips into the room, motioning for Will to follow. Will peers inside before he does so.  
It’s a small study, but it doesn’t look so studious. The walls are covered in posters, mostly of bands like Imagine Dragons and Led Zeppelin (which feels like a weird combination), scrap paper covered in writing and general checklists that clearly have never been touched.

“This is where Jason’s _supposed _to study,” Nico says, and blows some dust off an empty folder. “But he uses this place to play the Sims 4 and text Percy in peace. I think it’s like, his second bedroom.”  
“I can’t imagine having so much money you can just have a second bedroom,” Will says, taking a seat on the carpeted ground and staring at one of the slips of lined paper on the walls. It’s written in messy, almost illegible handwriting.  
“I know. It’s ridiculous.” Nico uncorks the bottle of whiskey he brought up and takes a mouthful of it straight from the neck. He pulls a face. “Ugh. I should have brought a mixer. And cups.”  
“Do you do this every party?” Will blurts, leaning his chin on one of his knees. The other leg rests on the floor. “Come upstairs and just drink by yourself?

Nico looks confused, or incredulous, for a moment. Then laughs quietly.  
“Not by myself,” he corrects. Will can’t help but notice that his left cheek forms a dimple when he smiles and laughs like this. “Most of the time I don’t even come to parties. When I do, it’s because Percy thinks I’m being antisocial and that I should spend time with _his _friends, just because one of them is my sister and the other is a guy I’ve known since I was four. And then I find someplace quiet. And then I drink with Reyna, usually.  
“Who’s Reyna?” Will watches Nico take another swig of whiskey. He swirls the liquid in the bottle.  
“The best one of all those guys. She’s Jason’s ex, but they’re still friends. She’s the only one I can hold a conversation with, and it lasts longer than a minute.”

“She sounds pretty cool,” Will says, and realises the door’s still open. He gets up to shut it; as soon as he does, the music pretty much disappears, and everything feels a hundred times better. Calmer. Nico motions for Will to dim the lights, and Will does.  
“Jesus, that’s better. Bright lights suck ass.” Nico settles back into an armchair, like the absence of shitty pop music is a relief to him as well. “Yeah, she’s awesome. But she’s working tonight, unfortunately. Lucky you ended up here.”  
Nico holds out the bottle as Will sits back down. Will stares at it for a second, contemplating—he’s never really been much of a drinker. The only time he ever got drunk was when he was staying the night at Drew’s sometime last year.

It might be nice to do it again, especially in the presence of a very cute guy.

“Thanks.” Will takes the bottle and brings it to his lips. The rim tastes like whiskey (wow, he never would have expected that) and, for some reason, coconut. He swallows a mouthful of the almost-golden liquid, and feels it pool with heat in his stomach. He hands it back to Nico.  
“So why’d you come tonight, if you don’t like parties?” Nico asks, drinking from the bottle again as he takes it back from Will. “Did you get dragged here too?”  
“Sort of.” Will doesn’t know what to say—he can’t just go all out and tell Nico he’s here because he wanted to find _him_. That would be bonkers. He’ll have to make up something harmless. “Drew wanted to go, but she didn’t want to go alone. I offered to come.”  
“A mistake?”  
“Maybe. I’m having a good time now.”

Nico grins. He pushes his hair off his face again and offers Will another drink. He takes it.

“So, is Drew your… friend?” Nico pauses, and Will feels his stomach roll. He takes another mouthful of whiskey before handing it back. It’s obvious what the pause means.  
“Yeah. She’s my best friend. No, we’re not together—if anything, she’s probably trying to hook up with somebody downstairs right now. She’d like to kick her summer off with that, I think.”  
“Right.” Nico passes the bottle to Will again, and Will realises this has become a sort of pass-the-parcel situation with no music. “She’s the party type?”  
“She’s party personified. I don’t really know how we’re friends.”  
Nico snickers. He flings a leg up to rest on the other and settles further into the armchair. Will falls back to lie on the ground.

“Ah, well. I feel that way about Jason, sometimes.” Nico takes a smaller sip from the bottle. “Whatever. _Do _you have a girlfriend?”  
“Nope. Never had one ever. Girls haven’t ever been that interested in me.”  
“Boyfriend?”  
“You ask a lot of questions, Nico.” Will’s heart feels a bit lighter, and his brain a bit airier. There’s a buzz coursing through his body. Is he seriously getting tipsy already? Fuck, he’s a lightweight. “It’s charming.”  
Nico tilts his head, and his eyebrow cocks again.   
“Really? Most people say it’s annoying. But you didn’t answer.”  
“No. I’ve never dated anybody. Drew calls me a ‘virgin in not only sex but dating’, which makes it harder to get a date at all.”

Will downs another mouthful of the whiskey. How has the bottle gotten so empty so quickly?   
“You?” He asks, moving his arm so that it’s bended and tucked beneath his head, so that his head isn’t pressed against the ground with nothing to cushion it. “Ever been in a relationship?”  
“One.” When Nico takes another mouthful, he leaved behind enough for one more sip. He lets Will have it as he continues. “I dated a guy for a month when I was fourteen, but he turned out to be an asshole. Then he was my roommate the next year and I seriously considered forcing my dad to let me move schools.”  
“Ugh,” Will groans. “Sounds like it would suck, not that I have any exes to compare the situation to. Drew has enough to go around.”

Nico starts to laugh, and the sound is contagious. Will lifts his knees up and laughs along, and now he can’t stop, even though it isn’t funny. Like, not at all. He’s getting drunk off whiskey and high off the feeling of just being in the same room as Nico, having a proper conversation with him and watching him lean casually on his wrist.  
“Maybe now that I’m out of high school I’ll have more luck,” Will says once he’s finally finished laughing and wiping tears off his face. “New life, right?”  
“New life?”  
“Yeah, I mean—like, I’m already doing things I’ve never done before. Going to a party and then striking up a conversation with some guy I’ve never met.”

“Damn.” Nico pushes his toes into the floor, his shoes glinting. “I never thought about it like that.”  
“Hm.”  
Nico groans, and slides off the armchair, before angling himself so he’s laying in the opposite direction to Will, their heads side by side.  
“Chair no comfortable?” Will mumbles. Nico shrugs, and folds his hands over his stomach.  
“You felt too far away. It felt awkward.” Will can’t really hear the music downstairs, but he can feel the floor beneath them thumping with the bass. He can also hear his heart beating like a fucking snare drum.  
“Who chose the music for this party?” Will complains. Nico snorts, and Will laughs too, because he seriously can’t help it—Nico’s laugh is a melody, and he wants to learn how to sing it.

“Leo Valdez. He thinks his playlists are ‘ethereal’, to quote. I think his actual talent is managing to create a playlist full of songs that all sound exactly the same.”  
“Right.” Will presses his hand to his phone, in his pocket. It feels cold on his warm hands, like a kiss from a snowflake. “I like making playlists. I make them all the time.”  
“Oh?” Nico turns his head so he’s looking at Will instead of the ceiling, so Will does the same. He hadn’t realised how close their heads are until right now. Nico’s face is flushed and pink with the alcohol. “I bet they’re a hundred times better than Leo’s.”  
“I would say so.”  
“Can I hear one?”

Will doesn’t know what to say at first, because he’s never showed anybody his playlists. Not Drew, or Lou Ellen, or Cecil, or Finn, or Sophie, or Craig—not even Naomi. He feels like it’s too intimate, too much like giving somebody a piece of your soul, or a telescope straight into your brain. But when he looks at Nico, who’s eyes are a really, _really _gorgeous shade of brown and full of curiosity, he wants to play every playlist he’s ever made.  
Jesus, what’s wrong with him? First, he’s tracking somebody down on Instagram, then he’s getting drunk with them, and now he’s letting them listen to his music? He must be going crazy.

“Yeah, sure.” Will pulls out his phone and goes into Spotify, hitting play on his life’s soundtrack, the playlist he’s put everything into. Suddenly, the feeling of living a sappy queer movie doesn’t feel like a faraway fantasy—it feels just a little bit real, and when Troye Sivan rings out softly, it only makes it better.  
“What’s this one called?” Nico asks, closing his eyes and smiling ever so slightly as he listens. Will swallows his nerves.  
“’Soundtrack of my life if it was a movie’. I made it start of senior year. There’s a lot of Bleachers on here. And Troye Sivan, I guess.”  
“Bleachers?” Nico asks. His hair falls over his forehead and down his cheek, splayed like the freckles Will can make out clearly now, but this time he leaves it there. “I’ve heard of Troye Sivan. He’s pretty fucking good. Never heard of Bleachers before.”

“They’re my favourite band,” Will says. “You ever watched Love, Simon?” Nico nods. “They have a lot of songs on there. Rollercoaster. Wild Heart. Alfie’s Song. Then they have really good ones outside of the soundtrack, too, like Wanna Get Better, or Don’t Take the Money. The songs feel like taking a shot, but if the shot was serotonin.”  
“Damn.” Nico opens his eyes, and he makes eye contact with Will, unbreaking and unwavering. “That’s one hell of a feeling. Play some.”  
Will switches the song, and his heart races with the combination of the energy from Bleachers and the way he wants to lay here with Nico all night, just listening to songs that are way better than what’s playing downstairs.

“They’re pretty good,” Nico says, still watching Will, who smiles.  
“They’re incredible.”  
Nico’s eyes finally drift from Will’s eyes, but now Will can’t help but feel he’s staring at his lips. _Or hoping he is_.  
Will really wants to kiss him. He wants to lean forward, close the tiny gap between them, and see if the coconut taste on the whiskey bottle is from Nico’s Chapstick, wants to see what it would be like to kiss him. Kiss anybody, but particularly Nico.  
“Hey,” Nico says.  
“Hi,” Will replies.

“Let’s play a game.” Nico’s voice is almost a whisper, but it still snaps Will out of whatever trance he was apparently just in. He stops inching forward.  
“Huh?”  
“Twenty questions. I’ll start.” Nico moves one of his hands to lay his head on it, and breathes deeply, so Will follows suite and realises Nico smells like mulberries. “Favourite colour?”  
“Wow, that’s such a risky question. I don’t even want to answer.”  
Nico shoves Will gently with his free hand, and Will laughs. “Well, smartass, I’m not about to start with the deep shit. That comes later. What’s your favourite colour?”  
“Blue. Pale blue.” It’s always been Will’s favourite. He owns about a million socks of the colour. “You?”  
“Burgundy.”

“Wait—” Will barks out a small, single laugh, and Nico screws up his face. “_Burgundy?_ Out of every colour?”  
“Yeah, I like it! So shut up. It’s your turn, anyway.”  
“M’kay. Um… you play any instruments?”  
“Piano.” Nico narrows his eyes and taps his head with the hand beneath it, which is attractive in a way Will _never _thought would be. “How about you? You look like you play ukulele but only know three songs, and one of them is Riptide.”  
“Hey! Wow, you’re mean. And no.” Will readjusts his arm, so he can get some feeling back in it. Definitely not so he can look at Nico better. “I can actually play the recorder, but that’s it. I can’t even sing.”  


“_Recorder_?” Nico loses his shit, like Will’s a stand-up comedian with his own Netflix special. “Oh, god. Please tell me you can play My Heart Will Go On.”  
“Of course.”  
“Thank you!”  
They laugh, and laugh, and the more they do it the more Will feels absolutely weightless. He never wants to get up from the floor of Jason Grace’s study. Nico coughs, and calms himself down.  
“Okay, okay.” He sighs loudly. “Hey, Will?”  
“Hm?”  
“This playlist slaps. You’re _way_ better than Leo.”  
“Oh… thanks.” Nico keeps complimenting him in ways Will doesn’t expect, and it’s driving his heart up the wall. It feels fantastic. He speaks without thinking. “I could make you one.”

“Wait, for real?” Nico props himself up on his elbow, eyes bright. “You could?”  
“Yeah, probably. What music do you like?”  
Nico opens his mouth to reply, but the door bangs open, and Will sits up so fast it’s like he’s been sitting in an electric chair. Jason stands in the doorway, eyebrows furrowed.  
“Hey! Come _on, _Nico, I said nobody upstairs.”  
“But it’s me. You can let me upstairs.”  
“Yeah, you can! You can’t just bring people up here, though.” Jason looks furious, and something tells Will it isn’t because people are upstairs. It goes over Nico’s head completely.

“It’s _fine_, Grace, Will’s great. He makes playlists.”  
_My playlist_.  
Will had forgotten he’d never hit pause. Jason can hear his music. He shuts it off quickly with panic and gets to his feet.  
“It’s okay, I’m sorry. I’ll go. I probably have to get home, anyway. I didn’t keep track of time.” Will swallows thickly, and turns to Nico, who’s also standing. “I, um. Thanks. I’ll see you around.”  
“Yeah. Absolutely.” Nico looks thoughtful, not for the first time tonight. “I look forward to that playlist, Will Solace.”  
Will smiles, and then practically runs out of the room, because Jason is really glowering. As he descends the staircase, he can hear Jason get another word in.  
“Nico, just cut it out, I’m not in the mood, okay?” He snaps. Will walks faster.

He finds Drew at the doorway, where people are slowly but surely milling out. He really let time get away from him—it’s twelve o’clock.  
“_There _you are!” Drew looks relieved. She lunges forward and hugs Will tightly. “You were gone for ages! I thought that guy kidnapped you!”  
“We were just talking.” _I let him listen to my playlist. Holy shit._ “It was cool.”  
“Okay, well, we’re leaving now, so I hope you said goodbye.” Drew pulls Will through the crowd of people, like Nico had, only with more force. “Did you drink.  
“Yeah. The stars are spinning.”  
“Jesus Christ. Okay, well, you’re lucky I didn’t even finish that drink Piper gave me. Get in the passenger seat. If you throw up in my car, I’ll kill you.”

Will hadn’t felt sick before, but now that he’s among a load of people again, his stomach _is _sort of churning. The humid air doesn’t help.  
“Thanks.” Will slides into the front seat and presses his forehead to the window, relishing in the coolness of the glass on his skin. He closes his eyes as Drew starts the car and pulls out of the driveway.  
“So.” Drew turns up the air conditioning and turns the music up. Some slow song from the nineties starts to play. “Is he nice?”  
“He’s so nice, Drew. And he’s funny. He laughed at my jokes. I want to talk to him more.”  
“Well, I hope you got his number.”  
Will’s eyes snap open, and he hisses ‘fuck’.

All that time alone, and not once did he ask Nico for his number.


	5. what's up, huckleberry?

On the morning of Will’s third day of summer, he wakes up with a blunt, throbbing pain in his forehead, sprawled on top of his blankets, wearing a loose t-shirt, boxers and a pair of socks he wasn’t wearing last night.  
“Jesus,” he mumbles as he cracks his eyes open and is immediately hit with blasts of daylight. He hears a thump on the other side of his room.  
“Morning, Shakespeare,” Drew says as she drops her other shoe on the ground, and steps into it. “How’re you feeling?”  
“Like somebody took a hammer to my brain.”  
“Mhm. Drinking does that to you.” Drew ties up her laces in smooth, short movements. “Naomi thought it was hilarious that you got drunk last night.”

“I’m not _that_ hungover, I remember everything,” Will sits up and feels his stomach flip uncomfortably and queasily. “Ugh. Now I’m gonna get a lecture.”  
“At least your mom just _lectures _you, and doesn’t ground you for three months, like mine. Even though Piper’s been living out of our place for a while now, mom’s still gonna keep her home for the rest of the summer. Unless she stayed at Annabeth’s last night.”  
“Your sister’s batshit.” Will slides out of bed and watches the shirt and shorts Drew chucks his way fall to the floor. It’s a casual t-shirt with a pocket on the left of the chest, printed with tiny comical suns, matches with a pair of yellow shorts Drew somehow actually helps him pull off.

“You’ve got three new texts and a missed call from Lou Ellen, by the way,” Drew says as she points to Will’s phone, plugged in on the other side of the room. It catches the light spilling through the window and casts a white light on the wall. “One of the texts is from Cecil.”  
“Is it ominous?”  
“As usual.”  
Will rubs his eyes as he changes, throwing on his binder somewhere in between, and runs his hands through his hair with a loud sigh.  
“I can’t believe I didn’t get Nico’s number last night,” he whines. He can see Drew snort while she brushes her hair into a stylish ponytail. “I talked to him for hours! We had a great time! And I forgot to ask for his fucking number!”

“Classic,” Drew giggles. She finishes her hair with a red hairclip, then leans back on Will’s desk with her arms folded. “You could find it. It wouldn’t be hard. Message Jason, or something. Piper could even get it for you.”  
“Well, I mean, I’m not getting it from Jason. He looked really pissed last night when he kicked me back downstairs.”  
“Oh, boy,” Drew hisses through her teeth, cringing. “Yeah, I forgot. He was super mad last night, but I don’t know why. Yet. I’ll find out. Maybe something to do with the fact that somebody broke his dad’s stupid glass golf trophy, and Jason’s dad isn’t really known for being forgiving. Anyway, you can get Nick’s number from Piper, then.”

“Nico,” Will corrects. “What do I do, then? ‘Hey, Nico, we talked for hours and maybe we bonded, but I’m stupid and forgot to ask for your number, so I tracked down your semi-friend and made her give it to me. So, how’s your morning going?’ Yeah, no. He’ll block me immediately.”  
“Probably because you didn’t mention your name in that example.” Drew and Will leave the bedroom and head to the kitchen, where Finn is drinking a steaming mug of black coffee (weird for a fourteen-year-old, Will thinks, but whatever) and scrolling through his phone. “What’s up, Huckleberry?”  
“Please stop calling me Huckleberry,” Finn grumbles, not looking up. His hair is matted to his face, and Will knows Drew wants to yank his head under some water and fix it.

“Why? It’s a good nickname. Will gets Shakespeare, you get Huckleberry. That’s the rules.” Drew plonks herself onto the benchtop and watches Will pull eggs and slices of bacon out of the fridge. “Look, Will, you just have to say something casual. Like: ‘hey, you’re Nico from the party, right? I’m Will’. You don’t need to tell him where you got his number unless he asks.”  
“What if he thinks I’m crazy because I messaged him? Maybe he thinks it’s weird when people just randomly follow up on somebody they met once and talked to for just a tiny bit.”  
“Three hours isn’t very tiny.”  
“Who’s Will talking to?” Finn asks, finally tearing his eyes away from some new meme Will won’t be able to keep up with. “Is he finally flirting with somebody?”

“Mind your own business, Finn,” Will mutters as he pours his coffee, slow as a buffering film. He sees Drew start cracking the eggs into a pan out of the corner of his eye. “I dunno, Drew. He’ll think I’m some stalker freak.”  
“Last night, after we got back, you said that you told him you’d make a playlist for him.” Drew throws some bacon into another pan. “That’s a big thing for you. And you can’t tell me you’re just going to give up on it. You said you’d do something, and you can’t go back on it.”  
“You’re just guilting me into messaging him, now.” Despite what he says, Will knows that Drew’s telling the truth. Will almost never makes playlists for other people, or offers to—he can’t back out of it and pretend he never said anything. He owes it to his own conscious and to Nico, as well.

“I’ll have to get his number, first,” Will says. Drew nudges him gently with her hip, smiling.  
“I’ve got connections.”

\--

Drew goes home at noon with the promise that she’ll worm Nico’s number out of a supremely hungover Piper once she sees her. Will watches her go from his porch steps, feeling a light Summer breeze weave through his hair and across his knees. He closes his eyes and leans forward with his arms hung loosely around his shins, thinking about a lot of things at once. The feel of the concrete beneath his feet. His playlists, all created for very specific moods (he shoves his headphones in, and hits play on his ‘solar system’ playlist, full of songs that he usually studies to). The planets circling the sun (which he tends to think about a lot). Whiskey bottle necks that taste like coconut.  
Nico di Angelo.  
Will needs to go for a walk.

He stands up and opens his eyes, tucking his phone into the pockets of his shorts and starting off down the street, watching his feet along the pathway. If he doesn’t take too long, Finn and Sophie won’t even notice that he’s gone, and he’ll return before Craig gets home from work (if he’s not home before Naomi there’s going to be a problem, considering she’ll be finishing her shift just before midnight). As he walks, he focuses on his music, trying to stop himself from thinking too much. When that doesn’t work, and he realises that there’s only so much distracting the sound of violins can bring, he goes over the facts he knows about space.

_Saturn could float on water, if there was a body of water large enough for it to fit on,_ he reminds himself, even though he never forgot. _And Neptune’s moon, Triton, orbits the planet backwards._  
Will was seven when Naomi taught him this trick. He’d always been an anxious child, and when there were things Will was scared of that he couldn’t control, and he would cry because he felt helpless, Naomi would hold his hands and tell him to think of something else. Think of his favourite things to think about. He would talk her ear off about the never-ending storm on Jupiter, or the invisible rings of Neptune, or even the asteroid belt in the solar system. On the day the scientists found Ross 128 b, Will didn’t feel anxious at all because he was so ecstatic to talk about it.

So as Will walks, he thinks about the planets, and the stars, and the nebulas and galaxies and black holes. He thinks about the time scientists discovered a radio signal being sent from five billion lightyears away, and that means it was sent before Earth even existed.  
He thinks a lot, which is a mistake, because he doesn’t hear the voice yelling ‘sorry! Look out!’ until something collides with him and knocks him backwards onto the concrete with a gasp.  
Will heaves for breath and zones back in to see a pale face, a mop of dark hair and deep brown eyes—fuck. Shit. Oh, god, Will’s going to die right here.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I—” Nico stops, his mouth half-open as if to say something, and realisation dawns on his face. “Will? Will Solace?”  
“Hey,” Will wheezes. Nico crawls backwards and grabs a leash off the path, yanking it so that a black fluffball of a dog bounds towards him. “Yeah, that’d be me. I’m Will. You’re Nico.”  
“I am. And I’m also super sorry. Holy shit, are you okay?” Nico stands up and brushes himself off before holding out a hand for Will to take. He does so and helps himself up with it. “Jesus, I’m sorry, I tried to stop, but Mrs O’Leary is kind of wild.”

“Mrs O’Leary?” Will asks, still dazed and kind of dizzy. Nico’s cheeks flush red as he jabs his thumb at the dog, who sits at his feet and barks happily.  
“My dog. My dad named her.” Nico laughs nervously. “I… ugh, it’s stupid, I like to walk her while I’m on my skateboard. She’s unusually strong and she pulls me along.”  
Will notices the black skateboard flipped upside-down on the grass next to the pathway as Nico says it, and then notices there’s no helmet. Anywhere.  
“You were skateboarding with no helmet?”  
“I live on the edge, Will Solace.”

Nico toes his skateboard over and tucks it under his arm. Mrs O’Leary nips at his ankles.

“Anyway, I’m so sorry. This is a really shitty way to reintroduce yourself to somebody.”  
“It’s fine! I should have been watching where I was going, anyway.” Will suddenly wishes he wasn’t barefoot and wearing a t-shirt with comical suns printed all over it; Nico looks just as suave as he did last night, with his sparkling shoes, black shorts and a burgundy button-up crumpled just enough to be cool. His ears are pierced with silver balls, this time. “I, uh, I mean… I wanted to try and talk to you again somehow, so, uh… so this wasn’t the worst.”  
Nico cocks his eyebrows, and his left cheek pulls up like he’s trying to hold back a smile. He rolls his board slowly back and forth under his foot.

“Not that I didn’t want to run into you again, but… I honestly didn’t want to _literally _run into you. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”  
“I’m okay!” Will pats himself down just for show, pretending his tailbone isn’t throbbing and his back doesn’t sting with a graze right now. “I’ve got an angsty stepbrother who likes pushing me when I annoy him, so I’m sort of used to it.”  
“Still,” Nico muses. “I feel really bad. Are you busy?”  
“What, like, right now?”  
“Mhm. For the next hour or two.”  
_I don’t have any plans for the rest of the summer. I’m just going with it, _Will thinks to himself as his heart skips a beat.

“Nope. I’m free,” he replies aloud, deciding that announcing how boring of a person he is to a cute boy isn’t a very good pick-up move. “Why?”  
“Can you let me buy you a coffee, or something? To make up for… uh, knocking you to the ground?” Nico looks sheepish—he rubs the back of his neck, and the tip of his nose blushes red. “Also, so I can apologise on behalf of Jason for last night, since he was unnecessarily rude to you.”  
“Oh, I mean, I’ll—yeah, I’ll get a coffee, but you don’t have to buy it. I have money to pay for it myself.”   
“We can talk details there. How do you feel about Starbucks?”

Will’s indifferent to Starbucks, so that’s where he and Nico end up, sitting at a small, wooden, round table with a couple of coffee rings here and there. Nico’s frame is small and scrawny, and he doesn’t tale up much space, but Will feels like a giant in this seat—they really don’t make café furniture with six-foot tall, fidgety people who can’t sit still in mind.  
“Sorry again, for knocking you over,” Nico says, fingers twirling a napkin slowly around and around. His skateboard rests at his feet, and Will can hear him rolling it side to side.  
“It’s fine, really. You don’t have to keep apologising.” Will’s determinedly staring at the napkin Nico is slowly demolishing, so that he doesn’t give himself away by staring at his eyes instead.

“Okay, fair. Let’s talk about something else so that I don’t do it again. Say sorry, that is.” Nico takes a long sip from his frappe (Will hadn’t pinned him to be the kind of guy who drinks bright pink, sugar-loaded frappes, but he’s learning new things about Nico every second, and all of them make his heart jump). “I should probably explain why you got kicked out last night, huh?”  
“I don’t really care about the reason. I mean, it sucks that it happened, ‘cause I liked talking to you, but like, I don’t care for gossip much. Not that it necessarily has to be gossip, but it probably is, because Drew was interested and if she’s interested it has to be something along those lines. I mean—uh—” Will stops after he realises he’s rambling. He folds his hands around his mug and clears his throat. “It’s whatever. I don’t mind. Sorry, I… I’m not great at small talk. It always turns into me talking a lot and scaring people off.”

“I think it’s nice,” Nico admits, surprising Will so much he almost knocks over his coffee. “I hate it when people only want to make small talk. It’s stupid when people have one thing to say and then they want to chat about average things.”  
“Huh.” Will’s voice breaks, because _Jesus Christ, _this guy just keeps getting better, doesn’t he? “But, uh, I… if you want to tell me about Jason you can. I don’t care either way.”  
“Eh, if you’re not up to date with gossip, it’ll probably bore you to death. I had a bad enough time listening to him whine about it after everybody left. Maybe your friend will know.”  
“She definitely will by the end of the day.”

Nico laughs and it makes Will laugh, too; he thinks that if rich chocolate had a sound, it would be Nico’s laugh. It’s something incredible and something sweet, and it’s fucking perfect. Everything about this guy is _perfect_. Will doesn’t know how he’s still breathing.

“But anyway. Something else. I vaguely remember you talking about how much you like making playlists last night, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I might have asked you to make me one?”  
“Oh, you did,” Will swallows another mouthful of burning black coffee. His throat scalds. “I, uh, offered. I didn’t get a chance to ask what kind of songs you wanted on there.”  
“Surprise me!” Nico grins lazily, and strands of hair fall over his face like a curtain. It’s gorgeous. Will feels like a lovesick idiot. “Here, I’ll give you my Spotify account—” Nico grabs a napkin and pen, and scribbles down a username and the words ‘moody songs’, “—and one of my three playlists I’ve created, and that way you can see what kind of music I’m into. But if you can, some songs you love would be incredible as well.”

“You have a playlist called ‘moody songs’?” Will asks, and maybe that’s a weird thing to notice, but the thing is, he names all of his playlists something niche. Something so specific, and yet so _correct_, that his playlist library is a mess of quotes and inanimate feelings.  
“Well, yeah. It’s a bunch of songs I listen to when I want to be moody. It tends to happen more often than I’d prefer, but whatever, y’know?” Nico brushes it off. “Anyway, if you still can’t get that account, here’s my number. Text me and I’ll send you a link.”  
Nico adds a phone number to the napkin, then slaps it into Will’s hand. His eyes gleam.  
“You’re very eager about this,” Will points out. Nico shrugs.  
“People don’t often do nice things like this for me. It makes me happy.”

Nico’s sheer honesty is one of the defining reasons Will wants to hang out with him for the rest of his life. It’s admirable, and certainly not a trait that’s easy to find. Will smiles and folds the napkin carefully into his chest pocket.  
“I’m happy to be a rare case,” he says. The faint freckles on Nico’s nose crinkle as he smiles.  
“Do you always do this? Just offer to do things for people you barely know? Are you honestly that nice all the time?”  
“I like doing things for everybody. It makes me feel needed.” Will has grown up always trying to do things for people, whether that be delivering a note for his teacher, cleaning something for Naomi, and as he got older, buying things as a surprise for his friends.

“More people should be like you, then. I think the world would be a better place to live.” Nico chews on his straw, swirling the sweet pink liquid inside around and around just as slow as he was twirling the napkin before. He snaps his fingers, as if he’s come to a fantastic realisation. “Hey, we never finished twenty questions! Where did we leave it?”  
“Why?”  
“So we _can _finish it. You said you were free, right?” Nico’s eyes are a lighter colour in the sunlight that pours through the window next to them, soft and flecked with gold spots, windows into his brain where Will can see a world of trouble he wants to live in: midnight drives going ninety miles per hour in an eighty zone, bottles of whiskey with coconut aftertastes, playlists named after boys with black glittery shoes, and standing on the roof of an abandoned school somewhere in Texas and yelling as loud as the lungs can go.

If Will survives this afternoon, he’ll be surprised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! sorry this one took so long to come out, and sorry it's so short. had a fat lot of writer's block for it :(


	6. for the boy with the glittery shoes

“Alright, final question. I can’t believe it took us an hour to get to this point.” Nico’s on his second muffin, and Will’s ordered three Venti water cups since he finished his coffee, which points out how many times they’ve gotten off track. Not that Will cares—he’s used his time wisely, finding out all different kinds of things about Nico, from common trivia to tiny details no-one else knows.  
“That’d be my fault. I’m not very good at staying on track.” Will crunches on an ice cube, grinning cheekily at the scowl that appears on Nico’s face. “What, you’re the kind of person who hates it when people chew ice?”  
“It’s not natural. You’re supposed to leave it in your cup. Twenty questions in and I didn’t know _you_ were the kind of person who does the ice-chewing. That’s a deal-breaker.”

“I would say putting water in your hot chocolate is a deal-breaker, but whatever,” Will says, and laughs when Nico kicks him in the shin.  
“Shut up, it’s nice! Anyway, I guess that makes us even. Right, last question.” Nico scratches at a piercing in his nose, a tiny red stone Will has very recently learned he got as a double-dare; his sister, Bianca, has a matching one. Nico having two sisters was yet another thing Will found out in the past hour, along with his comfort food of choice (cold ravioli, which Will immediately gagged at), his favourite movie (Beetlejuice), and where he would travel to if he won a hundred million dollars (Greece, Italy and Brazil).

“Will Solace…” Nico places his hands palms-down on the table and nods, as if he’s totally satisfied with the question he’s come up with. “You got any nicknames? Honest answers.”  
“I’ve got a couple,” Will answers, and starts to count off his fingers. “Drew calls me Shakespeare, because of our shared first name. My mom calls me Mr Blue Sky, sometimes, but I don’t really know why. Something to do with how I was always outside as a kid. And my stepbrother calls me ‘asshole’, which is just because he’s fourteen years old and he calls everybody who wakes him up before noon an asshole.”  
  
Nico doesn’t say much for a while. He just stares at Will with one eye slightly narrowed, his hand drawing strange lines on the table. His tongue pokes out just slightly tracing his upper lip over and over. He’s quiet for so long Will gets scared he’s said something weird and ruined this whole thing (which would be a shame, because Will’s just started to relax his shoulders around Nico).  
“Nico?” He tries. Nico shakes his head and blinks.  
“Oh. Sorry. I, um…” Nico’s eyes look weirdly wet, and he squeezes them, shaking his head again and causing his hair to fall over his face. “Sorry. Zoned out. I heard you, though. Your mom calls you Mr Blue Sky?”  
“Sometimes. Mostly she calls me Will.” Nico just nods. Up and down. Will’s not sure, but he almost looks on the verge of tears. “But do you have any?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Nico clears his throat, and quickly wipes his eyes. “Jeez, what the fuck is making my eyes water? Yeah, my sisters call me Ghost, because I used to be obsessed with supernatural stuff. I always wanted to go to haunted houses or buy the books about true ghost stories. Reyna calls me Skeleton because I’m ‘so bony’. My mom used to call me…” he trails off, and blinks hard. Will’s never been good at connecting the dots—he can’t really thread pieces of information together like others can. So, he can’t tell _what’s _wrong with Nico, but he can definitely see that _something_’s not right.  
“What did she call you?” He asks. Nico’s eyebrow twitches.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it,” he assures. “Woah. We finally finished that game, huh?”  
“Only took seven lifetimes.”  
Nico snorts, and Will feels his chest flutter at the thought of maybe cheering him up.  
“Bit of an exaggeration—”  
His words are cut short by the sound of Will’s ringtone, a generic tune (since he can’t see the point of spending two whole dollars on a song when his phone is usually on vibrate, anyway), exploding into the atmosphere. Will pulls his phone out and sees his screen full of a picture of Naomi wearing weirdly-shaped sunglasses.

_Incoming call from: the og mom friend_

“Um, sorry, I…” Naomi never calls. She only ever texts.  
If she’s calling, something’s wrong.  
“It’s okay, don’t worry about it,” Nico says, waving Will off. Will smiles gratefully and presses accept.  
“Will!” Naomi’s voice bursts through the receiver in a relieved tone. “Thank god! Where are you right now?”  
“Hey mom. I’m getting coffee with…” Will hesitates, but Nico doesn’t seem to be listening. “…a friend. What’s up.”  
“If you can, I need you to come home right now.”  
“What’s going on?”  
Naomi sighs heavily.

“You’ll see. But you need to come home. _Now_. Don’t dawdle.”  
“Okay, okay, I’ll be there soon.”  
“Thank you, darling. Please be quick.”  
Naomi hangs up before Will gets a chance to say goodbye. He can feel his hand shaking when he puts the phone back in his pocket. There are so many reasons Naomi would need him home, but Will’s mind races with every single person who might have died. Perhaps Sophie’s in the hospital. Maybe Craig’s diner was shot up, like the nightmares Will has every now and then. What if Finn’s gone missing?  
Then again, Naomi hadn’t sounded like she was crying…  
Will’s brain still jumps with all different awful prospects.

“I’m so sorry, I have to go,” Will apologises as he stands up. Nico looks up from his hands with raised eyebrows and a surprised mouth.  
“What’s wrong?”  
“I… don’t know. Family stuff. I need to get back home.” Will makes sure he still has the napkin with Nico’s number and Spotify account on it, then starts to head for the door. Nico bounds out of his chair and grabs his board.  
“Wait, wait, I’ll walk you back. I’ll make sure you get home safely.”  
_Oh for fuck’s sake_, Will thinks as his cheeks go pink and he shrugs. _He’s charming, _and _he insists on being a gentleman. Message received, he’s perfect and unattainable._  
“Okay, but I have to be quick, so hopefully you can keep up.”  
“I’ve got a skateboard and a dog. If anything, _you’ll _be keeping up with _me_.”

\--

Will sees the problem as soon as his house comes into vision. A problem in the shape of a gold-painted Maserati Spyder sitting in his driveway, burning the eyes of every single one of Will’s poor neighbours. Lou Ellen’s curtains are all tightly drawn to prevent the glare, except for those in her brother’s bedroom (said brother leans out the window and gawks at the vehicle; Will can’t blame him).  
“Woah,” Nico mutters, shielding his eyes against the dazzle of the car. “Which one of your neighbours is such an asshole they own a car like that? Bet they took the muffler off, too.”  
“It’s not my neighbour’s car,” Will grumbles back, folding his arms. Mrs O’Leary yaps at his heels. “That’s _my_ house.”

Nico looks like he might want to hit himself, and opens his mouth, but Will beats him to his probable apology by explaining.  
“It isn’t my car. It isn’t my mom’s or my stepdad’s either. And you’re right. The owner is a total asshole.” Will groans as he sees a flash of blond hair in his doorway. “Fucking hell. What does he _want_?”  
Nico’s mouth opens and closes like he’s a fish out of water. He looks from the car, to Will, to the man whose entire figure is now visible on the porch, and back to Will.  
“If you don’t mind me asking, uh… why’s the asshole owner of that stupid car look so much like—”  
“Please don’t finish that sentence,” Will says defeatedly. “If I have to hear somebody say it again, I’m going to dye my hair and wear contacts.”

Nico nods slowly, which he seems to be an expert at. He closes his eyes for a moment, opens them again, and shuts them once more.  
“He’s your… relative?”  
Will doesn’t answer. He stops walking, and turns to Nico, who looks so sympathetic and guilty that Will wants to give him a hug.  
Not that he’ll do that. Because he isn’t some creep who hugs people he’s only known for a day or two. He’s a gentleman.  
_Unlike the jerk standing at the front of my house, who could be campaigning for asshole of the year if he wasn’t too busy winning ‘world’s worst dad’._

“You should probably go,” Will says with a sigh. “Thank you for walking me back, but I don’t want you to have to see what comes next. There’ll be a fuckton of yelling.”  
“Noted and permanently engrained.” Nico tugs on Mrs O’Leary’s leash and puts his second foot on his board. “It was good hanging out with you, Will Solace. Mr Blue Sky. Nah, that’s… I have to come up with a new nickname for you.”  
“People only really do that when they plan on seeing each other again.”  
“Well.” Nico’s eyes twinkle, and he points at the napkin in Will’s chest pocket. “I get incredibly bored when Reyna’s working, and all Jason wants to do is whine about his boyfriend. Call me when you’re free.”

With that, Nico grins, mock-salutes, and rides away, speaking in a playful tone to encourage Mrs O’Leary to run faster. Will watches him go with a hulk-sized, dopey grin, which immediately falls to a scowl when he turns back around and sees that his father is still standing on a porch that _isn’t his_. Will stomps with large steps to get there, feeling like his head is full of molten rock as his ears throb and his eyes sting with anger.  
As he gets closer, Will can hear the conversation his father is clearly having with Naomi, and it only gets more and more heated as it progresses.

“He finished school, Lester, and _you didn’t even realise_?”  
“I’ve been busy, dear—”  
“Do _not_ call me ‘dear’! You have no right to do that! Not when you can’t even remember how old our son, your own _child_, is!”  
“Of course I remember how old he is! He turned eighteen in February. It slipped my mind, alright? I have more than one kid—”  
“So do I! I have three children, and I have never once in my_ life _forgotten an event as important as this. Your son graduated, and you weren’t there because you didn’t even remember it was happening.”  
“Maybe you should have told me about it, then.”  
“I did! I texted you hundreds of times to remind you! And even if I didn’t, it shouldn’t be _my_ responsibility to tell _you _that you have to put in an effort to care about _our_—”

“What are you doing here?”

Will hadn’t meant for his voice to come out so loud and barking, or so furious, but he supposes there isn’t any point in hiding how he feels anyway. Lester and Naomi are both cut short—they turn their heads so quickly to Will that he’s sure they’re getting whiplash. Naomi’s face doesn’t change; she doesn’t bother keeping secrets from Will, and that includes how she’s feeling at any point in time, and right now she looks frighteningly rage-filled. Her eyes might as well be lasers.  
Lester, however, slaps on a fake beaming smile and throws his arms out wide, spreading his fingers and tilting his head.  
“Will! There you are. How are you?”  
Will notices observantly that Lester hasn’t asked where he was. His level of caring has dropped below the ground.

“I’m—it doesn’t matt—why are you _here_?” Will sputters. “Don’t you have to teach something? You always have some class to teach.”  
“Well, I happen to have a week off, so I decided to drop around and ask if you wanted to spend a week at mine, son.” Lester’s smile is so horribly forced, Will wanted to smack him. Maybe he wants to smack him for other reasons, too. Maybe Lester’s face is just incredibly smack-able.  
“I do not want to do that,” Will says bluntly, and barely a flash of hurt crosses his dad’s face. It’s painful to see how little he cares about this—the only reason he’s even asking this is because he wants to stay in the good books.

“Now…” Lester starts, but Naomi cuts him off harshly.  
“Will’s an adult. He can make his own decisions. He doesn’t have to go to yours if he doesn’t want to.”  
“I know that,” Lester snaps, which Will reluctantly takes as an accomplishment, because upon hearing the words ‘Will’s an adult’ he himself almost had a heart attack. It hadn’t been something he’d even considered until it was said aloud. “I’m just offering… and besides, Kayla and Austin want to see him. They miss him.”  
Guilt settles in a thick pool of sediment at the bottom of Will’s chest. He loves his siblings, and he knows Lester’s at least being honest about this part, because they’ve mentioned on multiple occasions that they want him to stay.

It’s just that… staying with Lester requires a lot of effort. Effort isn’t really something Will has a lot of right now, considering he’s just finished school and he’s been running on the thought that he won’t have to think things through for eleven weeks. And it always makes him feel awful to see how much Lester loves and cares about Kayla and Austin, when he’ll barely spare Will a glance or ask him how his day is going.  
On the rare occasion Will _does _spend time at Lester’s, it’s usually only for a weekend, just a couple of nights so he can meet up with his siblings again and he won’t be subjected to the pain of being the leftover child for too long. Right now, Lester’s offering an entire _week_.

Sorry, Kayla and Austin. He can’t handle that long.

“I’m not going,” Will insists. He folds his arms over his chest. “Tell Kayla and Austin I’m perfectly happy to meet up with them on Wednesday for laser tag or bowling or whatever they want, but I’m not staying a week at yours. So, thank you for dropping by and cutting my plans short, but the final answer is a solid ‘no’. You can leave whenever.”  
Lester closes his eyes tightly and takes the same stance as Will—arms crossed tightly, and one foot turned out. Will quickly changes his pose. It’s bad enough looking like his father—he’s not about to act like him as well.  
“Will,” he says, with the same tone he used to use when Will was little, and he touched the grand piano without permission. “You can’t even consider it?”

“I did consider it. The cons outweigh the pros. Please leave.” Will’s eyes sting, but he isn’t quite sure whether the burn is because he’s furious at this deadbeat excuse of a father, or because he’s upset that this is how things have to be. A mix of both, maybe.  
“Alright.” There’s a strange and unfamiliar sadness in Lester’s eyes that Will has never seen directed at him before. He’s clearly not used to being told ‘no’. “Alright. I’ll go.”  
“About time,” Naomi says coldly. Lester nods, and makes his way back to that stupid, blinding car, now glowing in all of its asshole-ish glory as the sun just begins to set and casts a bronze shade over the world.

As he goes, Lester turns back, just once. Just to say one thing.  
“Congratulations on getting into Yale, son,” he says, in a voice so quiet Will can barely hear, and he knows Naomi can’t at all. “You’re really growing up, huh?”  
Then he slides into the driver’s seat, backs out of the driveway, and rumbles down the street, getting smaller and less dazzling as he goes. Will notes that Nico was right; the muffler’s been taken off.  
“God, what an asshole,” Will grumbles. Naomi places a hand on his bicep and squeezes gently, still looking angry but nowhere near as rageful as she had two minutes ago.  
“I’m sorry I had to pull you away from your friend for him,” she says. Will looks down on her, and a lump forms in his throat.

It’s not that he never realised he’s getting older. He’s been aware for years. But something about having to look down to see Naomi, even when she’s on her tiptoes, and hearing her voice in his head again saying he’s an adult… it just feels all too real  
Suddenly, Will understands why Naomi cried on her last day of school. He squeezes back his tears and smiles.  
“It’s fine. It was impromptu, anyway. He ran into me. Literally.”  
“Who, Cecil?” Naomi’s brow furrows. Will feels his cheeks go pink and he looks away, stepping back a little.

“Uh… no. His name is Nico. I met him last night at the party.”  
“Is he nice?”  
“He’s peachy, Mom.”  
“Good. I just care about you, you know? I don’t want you running around talking to people who won’t treat you nicely.”  
“I know, Mom.”  
“It’s my job.”  
“I know, Mom.”  
Naomi nods, and pats Will’s arm, before disappearing back into the house. Will catches her wiping her eyes as she goes.

“Oi!”  
Will’s startled from the sight of Naomi crying by the yell. He spins around to find the source of the voice, and finds it at the window a few houses down, where Lou Ellen’s brother still hangs out the window. Now, Lou Ellen hangs next to him, and it’s clear she’s the one who yelled, going off of her concentrated frown and her brother’s embarrassed, apologetic smile.  
“Lou Ellen!” Will shouts down the street. Lou Ellen sticks out a thumbs-up and cocks her head. _Everything okay_?  
Will returns the gesture and grins. Lou Ellen nods, then shoves her brother back inside and shuts the window. Will can vaguely hear her yell ‘why the _fuck _would you stare, you’re gonna get blinded one day, I swear to god’.

Will supresses a laugh and follows Naomi into the house.

Later, he sits back in the beanbag in the corner of his cream-painted room, under the painting of a field of sunflowers Finn did two years ago. His playlist blasts The Kooks as he thumbs through an old photobook full of polaroids and printed pictures that tell his story. Naomi’s in all of them, right from the start—Lester’s in one at the beginning, and he’s looking at something that Will can’t see. Drew and Piper start appearing when Will’s about seven, and Lou Ellen and Cecil join when he’s nine. Piper disappears when Will’s thirteen.  
The latest photo is of Will, Drew, Lou Ellen and Cecil, arms around each other’s shoulders as they laugh at each other, wearing their graduation caps and gowns and holding diplomas.

Will can’t stop thinking about the conversation Naomi and Lester were having before he interrupted, and he can’t stop thinking about Lester’s parting words. Was it true that Lester forgot he was finishing school? Does Will really mean so little to his father that one of the biggest moments of his life was easy for Lester to forget?  
Will smacks the book shut and takes a shaky, deep breath, shoving it beneath his bed again. He’s never had to be upset about this before—he’s always thought that worrying over Lester wasn’t worth it. It’s ridiculous that he’s almost in tears about it now.

_Congratulations on getting into Yale, son. You’re really growing up, huh?_

Will groans and presses the palms of his hands into his eyes until he sees stars. He needs a distraction. The Kooks isn’t good enough.  
_I’ll just play some game,_ Will thinks, eyeing his PC. _I’ll just play Minecraft. Maybe Cecil’s online._  
He stands up to walk over to his desk when he spots the napkin, and a number scrawled in black pen. He took it out of his pocket before he went for a shower.  
Making playlists is always a nice distraction. Will makes one whenever he needs a break.

He types Nico’s Spotify username into his computer’s search bar and finds the account immediately. The history says that an hour ago he was listening to The Killers, and when Will clicks into a playlist called ‘thank fuck school’s over’, he finds mixed mess full of rock, modern indie, 2010’s pop and old emo music Will’s pretty sure Finn uses as his ringtone. It’s crazy. It’s chaotic. It’s perfect.  
It’s Nico to the bones. Will _adores _it.  
He starts a new playlist on his own account, named ‘for the boy with glittery shoes’ and automatically sets it to ‘secret’, because he hates other people listening to his playlists without permission, and he make it public when he’s finished and ready to give it to Nico.

He adds _When You Were Young_, the song from Nico’s history, and feels his Lester-centred anxiety drip slowly away. Playlists are _fantastic_.

Will adds another song from Nico’s graduation playlist (_Breakeven, _by the Script, which Will personally feels is an incredible choice) when the history bar updates. Nico appears at the top.  
_GhostKing; Magic (Coldplay, Ghost Stories); 2 seconds ago_.  
Will’s taken aback as he reads it. Coldplay seems like _exactly _the kind of artist Nico would chill out to at eleven pm on a Monday night, but somehow, Will still wasn’t expecting it. He drags the song into the playlist almost subconsciously.  
Despite Will having an hour-long conversation with him that was completely about getting to know each other, Nico’s still a mystery waiting to be unravelled, one clue at a time.

Will hates how intrigued the mystery makes him.


End file.
